A new note at the top of a documentation page indicates that Microsoft halted development on Maquette, its VR prototyping tool.
Here is a copy of the note in full which can be found at the top of this Maquette documentation page:
Microsoft is not actively developing Microsoft Maquette at this time, and the access to the application in the store will be discontinued. Microsoft will apply the learnings from building the application and the feedback from the community to enable better tools for Mixed Reality content creation in the future. While there are no plans to open source any of Maquette’s source code, we will continue to offer the application as a download here. We want to thank the community for the journey and support.
The note has a similar feel to when Google announced the end of its VR art tool Tilt Brush — although in that case, the software was open sourced and made available to the community. We were first alerted to the update by SkarredGhost on Twitter.
Maquette launched in 2019, available for free and allowing users to create immersive VR concept designs and sketches from within a headset. It included “a set of tools for importing, creating, composing, and storyboarding content in 3D space, complete with a library of primitives and UI icons.” It even supported exporting content into Unity, where developers could take those VR concepts from Maquette and begin to carry them over into full development.
While development has halted, at the time of this writing you can still download Maquette directly from Microsoft here or access it via the Oculus Store or Steam. And while Microsoft Maquette’s story might be finished, one of the developers who worked on the application built another VR product in his spare time you can go download right now: Unplugged, the incredible air guitar game.
